Monday, January 12, 2026

Color Experiment: Horizontal Stripes From Nature Photos

My goal here as to experiment with ways to create color stripes from photographs. I could just eyeball it, or choose arbitrarily, but I wanted to try something more methodical. The color placement in nature photographs seems random to the eye, so I was curious if I could find a pattern in there.

Here's the original photo.

From a series of sunset photos on my photography blog.

My first step was to enhance the colors in GIMP photo editor.


This is probably closer to what my eyes actually saw. JPG images are actually camera edited images, where the camera makes guesses about adjusting things like light and color. I find that my camera usually gives me somewhat washed out looking images on the laptop I'm using. So almost every picture I take, I correct more toward what looks lifelike to me.

Next I cropped a section of the photo to work with. 


Then in Gimp, I added a transparent layer on top of the image.


From there I used the "select" tool to make lengthwise boxes roughly the width of the color stripe on the photo. 


Then it is was a matter of using the color picker on the image layer to select a hue, and then using the fill tool to fill in the selection on the transparent layer.



Here's what I ended up with.



I'd never guess it was inspired by a sunset. Do I like it? I'm not sure. The width of the stripes was arbitrary, as was which color I selected with the color picker. I think it is about as random as I've ever done, and I wasn't even aiming for random. For that matter, the colors seem anything but natural, don't they? But there they are, after sorting through a number of digital pixels.

Here's what it looks like when repeating the pattern four times (2 across and 2 down)



And here's the pattern x 16 (4 across and 4 down).


A pattern emerges with the repeats of the stripe sequence. 

Cropping a different section of the photo would give me different colors and a different set of stripes, as would using a different photo. 

My previous methods of working with stripes was either evenly spaced, evenly balanced, or as a Fibonacci sequence. This give me another design option.  

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